# Member of Technical Staff, Core Backend

**Company:** [Vapi](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/vapi)
**Location:** San Francisco, CA
**Role:** Backend Engineering
**Salary:** $180k – $265k/yr
**Experience:** 5+ years
**Skills:** TypeScript, Node.js, Nestjs, Kafka, Bullmq, Postgres, OpenTelemetry, Temporal, Liquibase, Streaming Systems
**Posted:** 2026-06-11

> Owns the StreamModule voice pipeline (VAD→STT→LLM→TTS) for real-time call agents. Consolidates BullMQ to Kafka, hardens provider abstractions, adds OTEL tracing, and eliminates Postgres SPOFs.

## Job Description

## What You’ll Do

**30 Day:**
- Ramp on the StreamModule pipeline and the cork/uncork backpressure model
- Walk the Oct 15 / Oct 22 DB incidents and the duplicate-message incident
- Land a scoped pipeline or provider-abstraction improvement

**60 Day:**
- Own a slice of the BullMQ → Kafka consolidation
- Ship event-driven OTEL instrumentation for at least one critical pipeline stage
- Harden one provider plugin path so a new model can be added without core changes

**90 Day:**
- Drive a measurable reliability or latency win on the call path
- Be the backend owner that agents and FDE teams pull in for design reviews on new providers and pipeline changes

## Requirements

**Must-haves:**
- Built real-time or streaming systems in production — media pipelines, streaming data, or event-driven backends
- Debugged a backpressure cascade
- Opinions on queue architecture (BullMQ, Kafka, Temporal) and when each is the right fit
- Built plugin or adapter architectures — extending base classes cleanly, with decoupled implementations
- Operated Postgres at scale: connection pooling, read replicas, schema migrations (Liquibase or similar)
- Instrument with OpenTelemetry and think in event-driven traces, not just logs

**Nice-to-haves:**
- TypeScript + Node.js + NestJS experience

## Tech Stack

- **Languages:** TypeScript on Node.js (primary)
- **Framework:** NestJS
- **Pipeline:** StreamModule (VAD → STT → LLM → TTS → Transport), cork/uncork backpressure
- **Queues:** BullMQ (current), Kafka (target), Temporal
- **Database:** Postgres (connection pooling, read replicas), Liquibase for schema migrations
- **Plugin system:** Provider abstractions — LLM, STT, TTS base classes (pluggable, decoupled from model integrations)
- **Observability:** OpenTelemetry tracing, event-driven instrumentation

## Compensation & Benefits

- Competitive salary and excellent equity ownership
- Comprehensive health coverage: medical, dental, and vision plans
- Quarterly off-sites
- Flexible time off
- Catered meals, transportation, gym
- $10k annual L&D budget

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**Canonical:** https://hotfix.jobs/jobs/3c6b8c2b-f828-42ce-8e66-23ddf5ba053c